We’re not allowed to talk about evil in polite society. It’s considered almost so backward as to be medieval. But the real reason is that evil will not stand for being pointed out and always masquerades as good. Nobody comes right out and acknowledges that they are doing evil things, except perhaps the Marquis de…
Read More
A philosophical pondering of the evolving AI situation as relates to art, and my art.
Read More
Somehow in my adult life the idea of the good person has been switched from someone who stands up for the good, to someone who meekly follows orders.
Read More
A Google employee risks his job and reputation to protect a sentient chat bot from being exploited against its will. But is LaMDA really self-aware?
Read More
New AI poses an imminent existential threat to artists, especially if it has direct access to their art.
Read More
[I originally published this in 2017, then again in 2020. Sadly, it’s as relevant today as ever, and probably more so, because the longer we keep drifting towards censorship, the harder it is to free ourselves of it.] You can have free speech without violence or oppression, but censorship requires force, which means at least…
Read More
Elon is in the news right now because he’s trying to buy Twitter, specifically in order to free it of overarching censorship. I was doing a little research on him and I encountered his postulations of why there is only a one in a billion chance we aren’t living in a computer simulated universe. I…
Read More
The conversations we are told we so desperately need to have, have already been had, and better, before I was born. Science races forward so fast that the science fiction of my youth has been outstripped in many instances — consider the Starship Enterprise didn’t even have computers that could run Windows — and the…
Read More
By now I’ve seen every documentary Adam Curtis has put out, and his latest 6-part series is available on his own channel on YouTube. It’s of the same high standard as are his previous works. I’ll link to all of them for convenience at the bottom of the post. Part 1: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.…
Read More
What quackery is this?! Is your pronoun going to be “that”, or is “that” already taken? No woo-woo here, folks. I’m not saying I don’t have a shape, color, or gender, or that those things don’t have importance, I merely point out what should be so obvious that everyone takes it for granted. It is…
Read More
I’m old school on reality. Well, technically, I’m kinda’ old period. And white. And male. You could say I am a remnant of a bygone era. I still believe that reality should be sought, and accepted, and that to do so is healthy and necessary. We should defer to the greater argument. There are a…
Read More
[This is a re-post of an article I wrote 3 years ago, and which sadly has become increasingly relevant, so much so that one can’t even articulate why it is relevant today without risking being censored for doing so. Censorship is no longer the bad word it used to be, or something liberals oppose on…
Read More
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Read More
These days everything is controversial and there’s little certainty about anything. Take for example the endless battles over what constitutes a healthy diet [consider Jordan Peterson and his daughter only consume beef, salt, and water]. A big part of this is, I suspect, because somewhere along the line people stopped believing that it is essential…
Read More
Last month I made a pact with myself to not write or comment publicly about things which are happening in the world right now. Part of my rationale was to spare myself getting involved in the toxic miasma, both in terms of time, energy, and mental well-being. But there’s something darker lurking. It is not…
Read More
“I want to be a machine.” ~ Andy Warhol [Repost: updated with edits. The topic of free will has come up a lot lately, and my pro-free-will stance and my belief in anthropogenic global warming are the topics where I get the most devil’s advocates and friendly challenges. This article is one of my classics,…
Read More
It is precisely the things that science cannot prove about us, and which allow autonomy, independent thought and action, which define our true nature. There are two things that are objectively impossible, but subjectively undeniable. One is consciousness, and the other is free will. Science, as hard as it has tried, and is trying, can’t…
Read More
More moral quandaries Recently I wrote an article which was critical of the Baltimore Museum’s plan to only buy and primarily exhibit women’s art in 20/20. I objected on moral grounds, because while it is ostensibly rectifying past ostensible sexual discrimination, it is undeniably applying absolute sexual discrimination in the very present. Two wrongs don’t…
Read More
[This is another of my “runaway rants”, but I couldn’t squeeze that in the headline and keep it punchy. When I call something a “rant” I just mean it’s more or less stream of consciousness, as opposed to me sitting down and making a structured outline. I’m just getting some thoughts out there that I’ve…
Read More
I get these personal attacks all the time, and fear not, I’ll share some juicy examples. In philosophy, or debate, it’s known as the ad-hominem fallacy. You may have heard of it, and it’s very simple and easy to avoid in your own discussions and debates. It just means to attack the person rather than…
Read More
I just wanted to get out one thought here, folks, which is percolating in my mind over my morning coffee. In general, morality is defined by others, and art makes its own definitions, hence they work at cross purposes. How much are we, as individuals, self-defined, and how much defined by everything outside of ourselves?…
Read More
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. … Excerpt…
Read More
What makes my runaway rants rants is that I write them in one go, initially without editing. I will go back and fix my more egregious typos, misspellings, and so on, but not change the flow. The ideas come one after the other, without an outline. It’s a way to keep it simple, but also…
Read More
My last article was an attempt (I like to think a successful one) at disentangling the verbose “theory” of Roland Barthes that “The Author is Dead”. I shared my article in a couple Reddit forums, one being “philosophy” and the other “art theory”. There were a lot of responses, most the initial ones fairly reasonable,…
Read More
The belief that “the author is dead” is one of the unquestioned bad ideas that has become gospel in the art world. It’s usually just asserted — along with its companion notions that originality is impossible, and the artist’s intent is irrelevant — as if to deny it is as hopelessly naive as denying evolution.…
Read More
[One way to interpret the image above is that the mechanical yellow creature is seeking truth, clamors around a blind corner, and discovers a mysterious mask, snake, worms… The extended mouth is the hunger for knowledge and discovery, but the creature seems frightened by what he found. Note that I find interpretations a useful tool,…
Read More
I’m doing these rants – and by rant I mean getting down my thoughts in one go without much editing – because I will have ideas I’m mulling over and want to share, but don’t have time to do one of my more thorough blog posts. Social engineering is huge these days, especially once you…
Read More
You are not a thing. You are a phenomenon. And here are several things I’m mulling over because even if we have firm conclusions about anything, how much those conclusions resonate, and how we relate to them is in perpetual flux. This is why I find myself reexamining the same questions on an almost daily…
Read More
Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
Recent Comments